Kevin Owocki: Gitcoin – Building and Funding the Open Web

Hi, welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Sebastian crucio. And I'm here with my co-host for the get horns. Today. We're talking with Kevin iwaki. He's the founder and get of get coin, and he's now a member of the get coined. Ow. Before we talk to Kevin about get coin. I'd like to tell you about our sponsors this week because the safe is a smart wallet. That enables you to control

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Thanks so much for joining us. Once again today. It's we're just checking earlier, and it's been since like, we lost have joined in 2018. It was like right after get coin, grants launched. So yeah. Thanks for coming back on. Yeah, it's great to be here. It's been a been a couple years, which is, as we all know, a lifetime and in the crypto space, but yeah, giggling grunts is now our Flagship product. So a lot has changed. Since I was last on the show.

Thanks for having me back. Yeah, it's a pleasure. I mean, get coin has just grown so much since the last three years and it's become such a like, a pillar in the theorem Community. Tell us a bit about, you know, your personal Journey since we last spoke and sort of, you know, try to summarize, you know, the last three years of your life and, you know, sort of the trajectory of get coin. Totally. Yeah. Yeah, we've been really lucky turns out.

There's a lot of people out there who want to get coins. And there's a lot of software developers who wanted to enter the space. And that's kind of our Niche is connecting the software developers to the funding that can fund their work in open source, and I'm super proud that our mission has always been to grow and sustain open source. Software open source provides so much value for the world. And this is not a business model for it because the code is

available for free. In fact, I think the number was five hundred four hundred billion dollars per year in economic value. According to a study in 2014. And since there's no business model, developers are just working nights and weekends for free. On open source software and that's always been our mission is to correct that asymmetry between value created and value

captured last time. I was on the show, which was I think 2018, we were primarily focused on doing bounties, which is basically if you do X, you will get y coins on get coin. And we've since expanded into get coin grants, which is basically, I'm already doing X and I would like to raise money for that work in open source software. And if you go to get coin dot Coast results, you can see that

we've done. 51 million dollars worth of funding for open-source software with an accelerating trajectory as the market has turned around, and I think, as our Network effects is have deepened. So, yeah, it's just kind of been really staying anchored to that mission of building, and funding open source, software, and digital public goods. And just being kind of really, really trying to innovate on how we reach that mission has been the trajectory for the last

three years. And so super proud of the Impact that we've had so far, but you know 50 million dollars is great. But like I said, four hundred billion dollars per year in economic value is created by open source software. So we're just scratching the surface of what we could do. If our mission was successful in helping open source software developers get coins. Quit, can you maybe give us a little bit deeper?

Look into the step. So, basically, how many different projects have received funding through they currently do to. They usually come back every every round or they one-offs. And I mean, so how many people in total have benefited, how many have have given to get coin? And yeah, sure. Well, yeah, I direct the audience to get coin dot Coast loss results, which is our open stats page. We like to be as transparent as possible with the stats. And the total is 65,000. Funders have given to an

audience of 20, 280,000 earners. And, you know, maybe there's a little bit of people who are creating alt account, says they've stood Anonymous identities and their 1.7 million. Complete transactions, over the course of the last several years.

So, um, you know, I'm most proud of projects like you NE Swap and you're in Aunt using get coined during the last bear Market when funding had really dried up get coin, grants had become a place where people could get get funding during the bear market.

And I'm really proud to have us supporting public goods like, while it connects and Prismatic labs and Nimbus, the eith clients that are out there are have a special place in my heart, as a software developer, who wants to see the people who are working on the foundations of our Network getting paid. So all in total, there's about 1,000 get coins.

Grants that return every round and take most of the funding every Bitcoin, grants around and there's kind of like a bell curve down to up-and-coming projects and newer projects in the space that can get discovered on get coin, because there's such a density of funding on get coin. It's actually become sort of an interesting place where new projects can come and Market themselves to the community and

make a name for themselves. Because with get coin, grants your, it's a crowdfunding platform where the median transaction is one dollar. And so it's a great way for for you know, for project raises from 3000 of their friends. For them to say, hey put look at all these people who are our peers in the community that really care about our project. And then that can be a springboard for larger grants from say the ethereum foundation, or I know that you wanna swap now has a grants project.

So it's a great way for newer projects to get momentum in the space by doing crowdfunding on. Get congrats. What's the measure of success here? Like you were talking earlier about the size of like, the open source market? At least value that it creates. Like, how are you tracking? The success of get coin in the sort of broader open source funding paradigm.

Yeah, well, the easiest number to track is just the amount of money that we've moved to software developers, but the number that's nearest and dearest to my heart is the number of people who can quit their jobs and just work on open

source software. If you've worked at JPMorgan Chase and now you're going to work on open source, then that's the future that we want to create people who can pay their Mortgage and pay their bills by working on public goods and open source, software and vitalik Booter. And in one of his reviews of get coin, talked about this idea of a quadratic freelancer, someone who is making enough.

Money from Bitcoin, grants or other public goods funding mechanisms, that can now quit their job and work for the open internet and it's just subsidized by quadratic matching. We haven't talked about quadratic funding, but that's basically the mechanism that

underpins get coin grants. And so the number the number that's nearest and dearest to my heart is the number of people who have found new opportunities that we've opened doors for either by quitting their corporate jobs and working on web 3 or coming straight out of school. If you're a student and working straight away on web 3, and it's a little bit hard to track that. Is we don't know exactly what

people's employment are. We don't have a good data source for that, but anecdotally, walking around it ECC. And he's Denver. I get approached by dozens of people who tell me o, get coin, open decks door for me or why door for me. And it always feels great to have those moments where you've, infected the trajectory of someone's career. And that's, that's the metric that that I optimize for. So let's talk about quadratic quadratic funding. So where did the idea come from?

And how does it work? Yes, o quadratic funding is basically an idea from Glen while who's the author of radical markets and the talaq butyrin who people may know is the founder of the etherium and Zoe hit Sig. And so basically, the idea is that it's basically in you run a matching campaign where you match contributions to a crowdfunding campaign and instead of doing one to one

matching. What you do is you match by the number of contributors to each Grant more so than the amount funded by each, It. So if the three of us all running a grant on get coin and my grant got $100 from one, contributor, and y'alls. Grant got $100 from 100. Contributors. Then, your Grant would get, like, 97% of the matching funds because it R optimizing for the preferences of the poor, and the many instead of the rich in the

few. So it's the, the mathematically optimal way to fund public goods in a democratic Democratic Community, because we're optimizing for the preferences of the Many instead of the rich few. And so that's why it coin, grants. When you give only a dollar, the Match, multiple can be really significant. It gets people over the free rider. Problem of, why would I find this public good that I'm already getting for free.

Well, the reason why you would bother to take out your wallet and give a dollar, is that for the projects that have the broadest base of support the highest number of contributors, a one dollar contribution can be matched with 200 300 500 dollars. So the match multiples, get quite insane. Once the matching pools, get big. And the Project's get a high number of contributors and that's what gets people over the free rider problem of contributing on get coin grants.

So I'm basically don't get scared off by the math. If you go to, if you read the paper, there's a bunch of Greek symbols and in math and everything like that, but basically, it's just a matching campaign where we match the number of contribute based off the number of contributors instead of the amount funded and that creates more democracy pushes power to the edges in ecosystem, fun. Ending. So get coin.

Grants is primarily doing quadratic funding on a main ethereum matching pool right now the last matching pool and grants round 12 in December 20, 21 was a million dollars, but now we've started to add these little adjacent fools for Eunice pop and for polygon and other ecosystems that also are trying to build their own ecosystems public goods and quadratic funding is just kind of the formula that gets people to actually Get off the couch in a metaphorical way and contribute

to the grandson, get coin. And I just run a really quickly say. I know that are in McMillan was on your podcast recently and he's running CLR fund, which is another really promising, quadratic funding project out there. And I'm a friend of our ends. And and I think that there's multiple implementations of qf, get coin, just happens to be the biggest in the earliest. So, how do you become super resistant?

I mean, what, what stops people from making multiple accounts and contributing a dollar each from 20 accounts? Yeah, that's a really great question. And that's kind of like the Achilles heel of quadratic funding is, this thing called civil resistance, which basically is sock puppet resistance in that example, I gave earlier, which was, I have a grant where I've raised a hundred dollars from one contributor and you to have raised $100 from 100 contributors and you get way

more of the matching pool. What's to stop me? As a person who wants to get more of the matching pool from just making up, 100 identities, and then Distributing the funding through that and that's called the Civil resistance problem. And it's actually one of the hardest unsolved problems in the space. Right now, imagine an ecosystem in which we can move from these one token. One vote systems, which vitalik has called plutocratic to one human. One vote that's digital democracy.

If we can move to a more one, human one vote type systems and so it's an unsolved problem. Our Approach at get coin is too. Only deploy as much Capital as we can, be sure that we can keep the fraud tax low, the fraud tax being defined as the amount of money that gets misallocated due to civil resistance. So there's an impedance matching between the amount of capital, that is being deployed. And the cost of forgery of all

of the accounts on get coin. And our approach is to aggregate civil resistance, indicators from proof of humanity, from Bright ID, from identi, from a bunch of different projects that are doing really amazing work in creating these Web of trusts in order to create civil resistance and we aggregate all of those signals and we are price assign a personhood score to each person on the get coin Network. And basically the idea there is

that the person had score is just the cost of forgery of each identity. So if I integrate my get coin account with Twitter, maybe that provides 50 cents worth of cost of forgery because Twitter accounts are easy to forge, but proof of humanity. I'm making up these numbers but basically like For Humanity, Chris $200 worth of civil resistance. Right? So you can give $200 worth of the matching pool to someone who's contributed based off of a proof of humanity, linked

identity. Anyway, so it's this whole Rabbit Hole of of how you solve civil resistance and we're just standing on the shoulders of giants by integrating with other civil resistance mechanisms in the space and it's an unsolved problem. I would not represent that we have solved it but get coin. Grants is actually one of the largest data sets in finding and sniffing out Sybil rings and

channeling. That information back to proof of humanity and bright ID is what Bitcoin Dow and the fraud Defense work stream has been working on over the last several rounds. So it is an unsolved problem and I would not represent that we have totally solved but we were trying to be responsible and allocating the capital such that the fraud taxes low and the big end game here is that get

congrats on its face. If you look at it looks like a crowd funding experiment and funding public goods, but if you look at if you turn it on its side, it's actually a giant red team blue team. Is in sniffing out Sybil attacks and finding new ways of proving these civil resistance. Ecosystems and the end result. Hopefully the positive externality of all of this is that we can create civil resistance signals for the rest of the ecosystem and move.

The rest of the ecosystem. From one token, one vote to one human. One vote is Hook. The hopeful eventual outcome of all of this. So tldr we haven't solved it, but we're trying to take it seriously and I'm very excited about a world that is more civil resistant. So in a way, get kind of distributes money to different projects by this mechanism, but where does the money come from in the first place?

Sure. Yeah, we distribute money aren't my my marketing lead has been coaching these like say that people are getting coins on get coin. So that's like the inverse of Distributing muddy on on get coin. The yeah, so people are getting coins from this matching fund. That that basically has been set up at first by the etherium foundation and what the etherium foundation wanted when they started engaging with get coin, grants was well, a vitalik wanted to something that.

Typed in the real world, this paper of quadratic funding that he wrote with Glenn, just like doesn't even fly. Like does this thing even take off her to just explode on the launch pad? Luckily. The answer is that it does fly. And the basically what the etherium foundation wanted was a more organic decentralized way of allocating funding in their community. So the if grants team is really amazing and they do such great work in supporting the major players of the ecosystem.

But if you're a more up-and-coming person who is not well connected in the space, quadratic funding is a better way to get on the radar. Because we can do thousands of Grants on get coin, via the matching pool. Where as a centralized grants team can only process on the order of tens of applications per month. So it augments traditional grant funding mechanisms for the EF. And that's that's why through rounds 1 through 6.

We run these grounds every quarter rounds 1 through 6, get coin, grants was funded by the ethereum foundation and then a really interesting thing happened in the summer of 2020 defies summer, Andre from urine. Finance which I don't know if y'all remember defies summer, but Andre was like the ultimate Chad during defy summer because he had just launched urine and fair launched it and gave it all away.

And he announced that he was giving 150k to, the get coin, grants matching pool and funding, get coin, grants around 7:00. And I think over the next 24

hours. I raised maybe like 1.5 million dollars just on Twitter. DM s-- because everyone wanted to do it. Andre was doing it was defy summer and he was the ultimate Alpha nerd and so we had this like it. Students are this like this phase change where we went from being funded, by the ethereum foundation to being funded by the defy projects that were taking off in the etherium space and now had these large treasuries and some of them are even alumni of get coin grants.

Like you're in finance, raised running the bear Market through Bitcoin, grants. We see this like people graduating into becoming alumni of git clone and then paying it forward to the back of the space, back to the space. And like, you know, arguably they're doing it for karma, but also, maybe they get some sort of brand Equity out of. Hey, we're funding public goods in the ethereal.

Um, space come work at urine or Yuna swap or chain link has been an amazing funder for us. Badger Finance has done some really great stuff for us. And so we call this the funders league, it's a group of projects that is now funding, the ethereum ecosystem, that our alumni of get clean grants and and and so that's rounds. So we've done 12 rounds of your

clan grants. One through six, with the etherium foundation 7 through 10, where the defy projects and then around Evan and FTS were taking off and so me and my buddy, Austin Griffith launched this pfp project called moonshot Bots, which are like these little pixelated robots that we put them on a bonding curve and we just had a hundred percent of

the money to public goods. We raised three million dollars for the the batching pool, which is just like I just can't believe how successful that campaign was funding public goods with then FTS. And the crazy thing is that the moonshot bats have been live on the get coin side on the avatar. Builder for like two years and no one cared until they were at of T's. So there's something like there's like, you know, like those clickbait articles were there like do x with one weird trick?

It was like, fun, public goods with one, weird trick, and if T, is, were a new way of funding public goods. So, so that's another way that we've been funding the matching pool, and then we just announced this thing called get coin aquaducts, which is basically, like, you know, an ancient Rome Aqueduct for a way of carrying liquidity from one location to another. I get coin aqueduct.

Is just a way of carrying liquidity from your protocol or ecosystem into the get coin, grants matching pool. And typically the way that is set up is that we will run a quadratic funding rounds for your ecosystem. If you set up an aqueduct to the matching pool forget coin. So a typical split is like 60, 40 60 percent of those funds will be used to build your ecosystem and 40% will be used

for the ethereum main round. And and so an aqueduct is is a way of funding Bitcoin. Grants, but also, if you're a defrag project that's looking for more Bottoms Up organic growth than quadratic funding is like the magic way to do that. So aquaducts our way of doing it. Anyway, tldr answer to your question. At first. It was the ethereum foundation, then it was all the defy projects then it was in FTS. Now. It's aquaducts.

We're basically trying to innovate in find new ways of funding public goods at get coin. That's the other side of the coin. And right now the matching pool has on the order of like 10 or 12 million dollars in it. So even if the It turns really bearish. We've got at least four or five more rounds at three million dollars per round funded on get coin grants. So we're staying ahead of the

problem is as much as we can. And yeah, I'd love to talk about get coined a little bit later, but they're actually doing most of the heavy lifting on on raising money for the matching pool now and they have governance rights over the funds. So they're doing a really amazing job of staying ahead of keeping the matching pool funded. That's really impressive. Yeah, thanks for. Thanks for explaining how the quadratic funding mechanism Works in detail.

I'm so earlier were talking about the the metrics, the metrics by which you measure the success of get coin. And one of the things that I think a lot about when you considering the success of like these new Innovative use cases that crypto has enabled. Like how much of that has leaked into the In crypto world and you were also talking about just the amount of value that's created in open source software.

How much how much of that are you seeing like, how is the is the quadratic funding model or the get coin model starting to leak into other areas of Open Source, software that aren't necessarily crypto focused. And is there an aspect of get coins success and that has to be specific to crypto in the projects that the that is funding in the fact that there's sort of intrinsic economic value inside those projects in a form of tokens or whatever. I guess.

My question is, does get coin and quadratic funding such as you've implemented it scale outside of crypto. Yeah, really great question. I think that the end game here is quite large. If we are able to prototype new ways of funding public goods in the etherium ecosystem. Then we could back Port, those two other other digital public goods. And then we could back Port, those two more, physical public goods.

And what if we've discovered more, efficient more fair credibly neutral ways of allocating capital and we could transport those to the world. I think the honest answer your question Sebastian is that I we haven't proven it out and I don't think that we really know. No yet, but there are some early promising signs during coronavirus when downtown, but I'm from Colorado and downtown Boulder.

Colorado, was just shuttered after the coronavirus pandemic, when everything went into lockdown and we got together with Katie Johnson and Zach Herring who are two of my compatriots from consensus. My consensus days. We've since spun out of consensus, but Katie and and zakhar our friends that I shared an office with and I was like, let's do a quadratic funding matching round for downtown

Boulder and we did. And we Raised 50k for downtown Boulder businesses that were affected by the pandemic. Now, having a living down livable downtown is a public good just like open source software as a public good. And I'm really proud to say that we implemented. It was called downtown stimulus and it was a quadratic funding matching campaign that just like accepted credit cards, no

crypto. Not even in the back of, no, not even crypto in the back and we raised 50 50 thousand dollars for for businesses in downtown Boulder, and I'm really proud to say that we had Words of contributions from people who weren't even on email lists. We're kind of like not even comfortable with with digital experiences, like just this like an e-commerce flow is is, you know, it's a in the same user experience, give one dollar and get tens or hundreds of dollars

in matching. And so downtown stimulus was a great success and I'm really proud that we prototype to that. We've not done another downtown stimulus because Bitcoin needed to focus on the ethereum space, but I'm proud that we That we put that model out there. So that's experiment. Number one, which shows. I think promise that quadratic funding could go more mainstream and then experiment.

Number two, is that in May of twenty Twenty-One get coin got together with open Collective, which is a prominent web to open source funding tool and launched fund OSS dot-org, which is a quadratic funding tool for mainstream open source software things like npm or in the python ecosystem and we were able to raise Hundred k for the web to open source ecosystem.

So I'm really proud to say that the psychology of quadratic funding Works, whether you put it on crypto rails or Fiat rails, and I do think that we've prototyped a fundamentally new way of funding public goods, you know, then to be clear. It's Glenn and metallics idea. I'm just like the guy who's bringing it to one of the one of the people who's bringing it to

the ethereum ecosystem. And I do think that there's a lot of Promise in in piloting, new ways of creating Regenerative Finance in the web three ecosystem, in the dock, porting them to the real world and I am my big hope is that get coin is just kind of like the tip of the sphere, what we do in the etherium ecosystem. We're actually launching this, this grants protocol, which is like an infinitely for cable

version of get coin. Grants and my big dream is that people take it and they go fund digital journalism ecosystems, or they go fund, climate change, or they go fund their downtown's. And I think that like, Oppie what we're doing in the ethereum ecosystem and let's let a thousand experiments Blossom and funding public goods elsewhere.

In the ecosystem is, is kind of what I would hope that get coins Legacy is when I look back on it in 10 or 20 years, and there's early signs that it that it's going to work really well, but I don't think that we've totally proven it out. And and to be clear, the Civil resistance problem is real. We need to solve that. We need to solve the problem of how we fund these matching pools at scale.

And, and those are the largest unsolved problems that I've got my sights set on. Right now is scaling this thing and bringing it to New verticals. So we don't the the tldr answer is Sebastian is that we don't know, but there's promising signs. What's the biggest challenge in terms of attracting funding? So like, you know, they're especially, I think in the crypto space where there are like VC funds and companies and doubts that have gotten maybe in that order.

You know, that I've gotten quite quite quite wealthy from from crypto and you know, arguably lots of the portfolio companies of ECS and like even the companies that they fund themselves also have gotten quite wealthy are using open source technology and It's a challenge in getting more funding coming from these organizations. And how do we sort of like? Encourage wealthy actors in the space to contribute. More to open source infrastructure, funding. It's a really great question.

And I think the answer is that it depends on the audience. I believe that. I mean giggling. Grants were funded like for 6 rounds ahead of right now and it's really been. I'm so thankful that the community has rallied around our mission and rallied around their project. And I'm just so heartened to see that as the community gets more rich, as the ethereum ecosystem advances, that their funding get coin grants and I do think that, you know, it really that, you know, a naive approach to the

Crypto space might be that low. It's all D Jen's and it's all selfishness. And and and I just don't think that that's true. I see us as the tip of the sphere for regenerative crypto economics and the type of people that realize that like, hey, what's the value of a Lambo?

If the sky is on fire? We're really all on this Earth together and we're all in these ecosystems together and it's incumbent upon us to make sure that our common space is, and our communities are livable and are supporting new people coming into them and Innovation. And so, you know, the people Who who really get that message? I think that we found a lot of luck in making sure that they are funding public goods, but, you know, part part of what we're trying to do is show

people that it does work. That you can have positive some games with crypto economics, even in an adversarial environment. And I think showing people that it's possible is is the beginning of educating them that there are mechanisms for making the world better and for making these ecosystems better and You know the big the big challenge is that if there's a giant hack actually I'll just adjust the openssl bug that happens in 2013.

There's this bug called heartbeat heart bleed which basically openssl was dumping the openssl runs every SSL connection on on the internet, the little lock in your browser. That shows you your website is secure as openssl and the openssl foundation runs on less than a million dollars per year in donations and just contract work.

And there was a bug and Openssl that dumped all of the contents of your web server to the memory, to the open internet, which for those of you who aren't even security-minded. Like, that's a bad thing. You don't want your secure server, dumping the contents of its memory to the open internet and it's because the openssl foundation didn't have like funding to work on this thing. That was a pillar of the entire

internet. And so when a Black Swan event like that happens, people understand the need to fund infrastructure and to fund our public goods. And the whole point is like getting people to a point. Where they'll fund public goods even without those Black Swan events, and I think that it's creating that social awareness of those things is, is like Point number one point number two is education, which like thank you for having me on the podcast so that we could talk about this thing.

And then three is like, we want to make public goods. Cool. I think that I'm so lucky that vitalik Booter, and who's the alpha nerd of the etherium ecosystem cares? So much about public goods and that creates a social sort of consensus that funding public goods is cool and it UPS your sort of Like social status to fund public goods. And I think we want to create that kind of like that social hierarchy where people were

giving back to the world. It is is is something that's seen as, as a something that's socially acceptable and even socially. Promotable, and, you know, I think that in the etherium ecosystem where the money is, there's everyone's like 10x richer than they were a year and

a half ago. It's been much easier than it is in like Communities, where you're really struggling, you will need a flan therapist or like the government to fund, a quadratic funding matching pool and those types of communities. But at least in the ethereum ecosystem, we're starting to see some really promising signs that people want to fund these, these ecosystems. So a lot of traction, but I think it's an unsolved problem. How has this worked in the OSS

and downtown Boulder cases? I mean, who Am I who gave money for the matching pool? In downtown stimulus. I went to I went to a couple, wealthy Venture capitalists / funders that have either invested in get coin invested in my past projects or the just that I've known for a decade and they were funding the matching pool Brad Feld. It has been an inspiration to me.

He's a prominent local venture capitalist and he funded a lot of the matching pool and then the good coin, grants matching pool funded some of it. And in the fund. S case po Mancini has been building web to open-source ecosystems and has a lot of connections to Tech Giants, that that give back on open Collective. And so she funded part of the matching pool. And then there was also members of the get coin, grants funders League, that funded the matching pool.

So it was just kind of leveraging, my reputation and the get coins Traction in order to create a pilot. And then you know, the idea is that once you have a pilot and you've proven that the model works, then you can then go to Local governments and people who are more risk-averse and and sell it to them. So yeah, that's how we solved it in the past. But I think in the future more systematic model is probably needed if we're going to scale

these things. I want to, I want to come back to the public good funding aspect for a moment and sort of the parallels that I see between like open source public goods and so, like, physical public goods. So like, you know, I think the Heartbleed example is a great example of underfunded software that is really under painting like the entire internet infrastructure.

And like, you know, if you look at say a country like the United States, where it's generally, accepted that the infrastructure there is falling apart. Like, you know, lots of A lots of investment was made in the 1950s and 60s and 70s and like, not so much in the last, you know, four or five decades that infrastructures fall, starting to fall apart. I had this one of your blog post.

You had this like really cool kind of illustration of like all the blocks that build up to like, you know, that web three wallet that you're using or whatever. And like underneath it. It's all just like, live P2P, and TCP IP. But so is there a risk that at some point like are are, you know, core internet infrastructure which by It was funded like very much, bye-bye, governments like you but US Government through the second

half of the 20th century. Is there a risk that that infrastructure starts falling apart because of lack of funding? Or, you know, is it stable enough or do you like what what's the risks here that come into play with regards to like this kind of fundamental core infrastructure, whether it's, you know, openssl or other other software. Yeah, I think that that illustration that you're talking about had a bunch of like little blocks that everything relies on it.

The top of it is like your bags, you know, like all of your crypto assets that you rely on or just funded by this, this, these, this like hodgepodge of Open Source projects and it's like, it's scary to have that much economic value relying on something that is is underfunded. And and I think that the answer to your question is that we're, you know, people are talking about the metaverse a lot.

The in the ecosystem, you know since duck launched meta and there's a big question about will you know is is the infrastructure of the metaverse going to be own free and open source? And is it going to be a public good? Or is it all going to be like

Facebook's infrastructure? And, you know, and like the endgame there is like are we all going to be stuck being tracked by Zuck and like have ads everywhere in the meta verse versus is it going to be more of like a public good, where you own your digital experience in a world increasingly? Created by digital software, who runs the code that intermediates

your experience with the world. And I think that if we want to move to a more free open society, that encourages human fruit, humid, thriving, and human flourishing that we want to have a world in which the software that intermediates are experiences in the metaverse is free and open and that you can Fork it if you disagree with that. And that's the vision of the metaverse that I want to see. Um, you know, and I'm not even much of a gamer.

I just like, I just think that increasingly Humanities experiences are intermediated by software and I want that to be free and open source software. So, you know, that's one angle on it. I think that that's one reason why it's important to fund our digital infrastructure. I think that we're seeing a world in which Warfare is increasingly conducted online via cyber attacks. And so, you know, there's like a National Defense, public good.

Sort of reason why we want to shore up our infrastructure and And I think that that's another argument for it. And then the third argument is just like sheer scale when we when TCP IP was first design, which is a very elegant and anti fragile protocol, it really it says grown several orders of magnitude since it was originally designed and making sure that our digital infrastructure is anti fragile instead of fragile. I think, is in the Public's best

interest. And so, you know, there was a sense of civic pride in my grandparents and and great parents generation in which they're building digital. Structure after WWII, and I really hope to see a reprisal of that around global citizenship and the public good for all of humanity and human thriving and, you know, I'm getting into like a little bit more of my like, hippy dippy side right here.

But, but I do think that there's a strong rationalist case for funding public goods, and digital infrastructure. But I in the until we make it cool until we make being an internet Citizen and and funding public goods. Cool. We're never going to solve these Global coordination problems. Is like climate change and digital infrastructure and cyber attacks and all this kind of

stuff. And so the world that I want to live in is one where we've solved those coordination failures, but I think that we have to create a social consensus and internet, inner subjective consensus, that not only that we can do it and that we should do it. And and that's that's a lot of what my work is, is Raising

awareness of these problems. Even when we when we think that we should do, it public goods funding is notoriously difficult because it's actually several problems rolled into one, right? So basically you have to decide what should be achieved. How should one try to achieve it, who should achieve it. And so, all of this kind of has to be kind of determined, there has to be some consensus on this and then basically, then you need to the fans and you need to distribute the funds and so on.

But actually, and I mean to combat This problem I think sometime last year vitalik published a blog post about retroactive funding, right? So basically so that would basically allocate funding after the end has already been achieved and what that's make make funding these in the first place, a little bit of a venture game kind of It kind of like to interest like the the the crowd that Actually has pretty good experience at funding very risk groups. Yes startups and other Ventures. Yeah.

So what do you make of this? Well, so the idea behind retroactive public goods funding is to create an exit for teams that work on public goods. So, you know, if you built libbed, P2P, and that's now underpinning the entire digital infrastructure or maybe openssl. We should stick with that

example. Because we talked about it earlier, then basically give those people an exit and give them like, I don't know, a ten million dollar or a hundred million dollar outcome for building that infrastructure.

And then, what that does is that it creates a market for Venture capitalists to come in and Seed, fund public goods projects, because Expecting that that outcome, they're making a rational economic game that they could create that outcome and you create the sea change where now all of this apparatus, that's only focused on projects that capture value.

Can now be all of that energy and all of that human Innovation that that has been focused on capturing value in the past, can just be focused on creating value without having to worry about capturing it. And that's the end game of retroactive public goods funding. I am very bullish on retroactive, public goods funding. And as I do more things with get coin, I'm actually realize in the quadratic funding is just

one tool in the tool belt. There's plenty of other really great ways to fund the comments and to fund public goods. And I Envision this core primitive of an impact owl, which creates positive externalities for the world. And if we just stack impact out on impact. Ow, then we're going to create more and more public goods funding and some of them will have their mechanism will be retroactive public goods funding and other of them.

It'll be quadratic funding and then there will be other mechanisms like proof of humanity, I think as an impact, ow, We just stack those things on top of each other until we create this regenerative, crypto economic infrastructure for the world. And it's going to be emergent to your point. Like, we need to create quite the magic of quadratic funding. Is that it doesn't matter what me, Kevin iwaki. The original founder of get

coins, values. Are we're building a mechanism that is a channel for greater combinations of intelligence and strength to come together and is the inner subjective consensus of the etherium community that is represented on get coin. So it's not my opinion. That's that's represented. We're just building a more perfect Channel 4. For valued signal value signals, to be to be created.

And so I think it's like when you stack all of those impact owls on top of each other, you get the inner subjective consensus of humanity, of which coordination problems and public goods. Problems need to be solved. And and I think that that's the real, the real end game. And and as you're right, you're right, it's multiple problems in one. It's what the people actually care about and how much do they care about it. And in what directions and it's creating a way where the values

of of What do we care about? And what do we want to support is aggregated and supported is the infrastructure that I think is being built in this space. And that's what makes me really bullish for regenerative crypto economics. Let's talk about impact dollars and regenerative crypto economic. So you've actually said impact, I was several times now. Kevin, so now, explain it,

please. Yeah, so, um, basically an impact Au is any doubt that has a positive externality for Humanity and I think that, that can be on many vectors like, get coins positive impact, is that it creates public goods funding proof of Humanity's positive impact is that it creates civil resistance in the ecosystem climate, how, which is a dowel that's working on making sure that carbon credits are well-funded. It's positive externality is

more pressure on carbon more. Incentive to create carbon capture mechanisms, which hopefully means more carbon capture and solves climate change. So, impact Au is just the load is just a definition of something that creates a positive externality for the world without being prescriptive about what type of positive externality and you know think of it like your see. 20 years E20 is this token standard that you can build a utility token on. You can build a governance

token. You could build Securities on top of your C, 20. And it's just that's the lowest common denominator of how you create a token impact. Owl is just the lowest common denominator of any doubt that creates a positive externality for the world. And the reason why it's important to Define that is that if you've got a stack of impact, owls of which there are already dozens, then what you're basically over time as you start like, think of them as like money Legos.

And if you just start to stack these dowels on top of each other, what the aggregation of that is a regenerative crypto. Infrastructure for Humanity. Remember, this is all being built on ethereum and adjacent web, 3 protocols, that are

transparent. Immutable Global and programmable substrate for human coordination and we could export so much human thriving for the world if these things hit web scale, so it's about innovating new mechanisms and funding sources that create positive externalities for Humanity. A plurality of them, not just quadratic funding and then stacking them all on top of each other and create.

In a regenerative crypto economic infrastructure for the world and that is my hope that the legacy of the crypto economic. Movement is is that we have created a system that is more efficient way of funding public goods and creating human thriving than the old nation, state industrial infrastructure that existed before. And maybe, you know, it's not a zero-sum. Maybe they augment each other and, and work together in order

to create more human thriving. But I see that elegant mechanism design on top of these coordination substrates that are web three. Is this like it's just a ton of like high upside for Humanity if we continue to stack impact. On top of each other and, and create that infrastructure for the world. And I'm just really bullish to see all of this starting to come together. Kevin. Let's make this more concrete.

So, basically there's also this book that you co-authored with a couple of people, the green pill book. So basically, it talks about regenerative crypto comics and it's actually, it's a really, I don't want to say, it's a read because there's a lot of pictures in it. It's very, it's very fast reader. I mean, it's very information, very idea dense, but basically, see the recurring theme of that book is combating coordination

failures, right? So check and basically the these impact douse, those are means of doing so. So can we give us examples of where in the in the world we live in, we see coordination failures and how they basically fail us as Humanity. Yeah, real quick plug for the book created a book. That's really, like, as you said, a quick read and basically Aggregates much smarter people than me, the metallics of the world, the biology's of the

world. The Glenn Wiles of the world takes, there's I, their ideas and puts them in a very comprehensible format for people who are entering the space and want to solve regenerative crypto economics. And I'm standing on the shoulders of giants by exporting the the ideas of Michael's argaman, Glenn while and all these people to the world. And, you know, as you said the Is an aggregation of other people's ideas and I would not

be there without them. But to actually answer your question coordination failures are any situation in which there's a dictator list dystopia a system in which every single person hates the system, but for lack of a better mechanism for coordination, it indoors. So another an example of that it that's more tangible than say, open source is let's like an

over overfishing example. Oh, so basically like if the three of us are all sitting around a lake and we can all make a thousand dollars actually know it this is a podcast about crypto so we can all make a thousand die per month by fishing out of that pond, but one of us can make a thousand and five hundred die by overfishing. That pond in the result is that the other people only make 900

die per month. Then basically, what you get is, you get a coordination failure where ever you individuals individual Is to overfish the pond. And the rational economic behavior is to is to over fish the pond until the pond is completely Barren. And none of us can make any money out of that pond anymore. So you get this like death spiral of all. We didn't coordinate to agree. Not to over-consume this resource and therefore, no, none of us have access to the

resource. So it's a dictator list distopia in which each of us, hates that system. But for lack of a better coordination mechanism, it indoors that's like a game theoretic. Um, and so, you know, that's that's what I see when I look at climate change. We all have a rational economic incentive to fly across the world and do business. And we externalize harm to the world.

We all have a rational economic incentive to free ride on open source software, despite the burden that that places on our digital infrastructure and on open source software maintainers and for lack of a better coordination mechanism and indoors. Well, now we've got a global Transparent immutable, programmable substrate for human coordination etherium Cosmos, you know, all of these different

blockchains. So now, we've got a guy like this, this amazing substrate for for coordination, where we can build these coordination games, and solve coordination failures by creating these coordination games. And so, the endgame of the book is just to tell people, like teach the game theory of coordination, and to tell them that better infrastructure is possible.

If we just choose it. And and so, you know, this is basically the opportunity that I see is just educating thousands and tens of thousands of young people who are maybe lacking hope or maybe lacking education about how we can solve these coordination failures in it. And I see this like, I hope that

30 years from. Now, this is the legacy of the web three ecosystem is that we bootstrapped this decentralized Finance thing, but maybe that was just the boot loader for a more regenerative infrastructure for Humanity.

Term. And you know, I know you asked me for tangible example, so I'll go go back from like the beautiful language and talk about tangible examples, but, you know, get coin is building public goods funding mechanisms for the world, which can be used for funding downtown's, that are affected by covid, or funding, digital infrastructure, or

funding journalism. I think that bright ID, and, and proof of humanity, and all these different identity mechanisms exporting civil resistance for the world, would create a lot of A lot of positive externality around identity. Moving us from one token, one vote systems to one human, one vote systems. And by the way, there's already people in Argentina hundreds of them. They just live off of proof of humanity and Ubi and that creates better circumstances for them locally.

I think climb a dowel in the fact that they have are using crypto economics to create more demand. For carbon credits is an amazing example of using aetherium to solve climate change and and you know, by the way, when proof of stake happens and we're all of a sudden using Nine, point nine,

nine percent less energy. There's gonna be a huge sea change in the perception of these systems to create positive externalities for Humanity. And I hope that climate change is one of the first things that builders in this space. Start to try to solve from there. So, those are some tangible examples, but there's likely dozens others, that, that, that we could go through.

If you want more tangible examples, and I hope to be invited back to epicenter in four years again, and we can talk about hundreds of tangible examples. At that point. Yeah, that'd be great. I mean certainly hopefully it will help you on before that. But I'd like to talk about. So earlier you mentioned that you were a member of the of the get coin. Dow U is you know Express that you didn't want to be called the CEO of the cake going down and that's fine.

I think we could just call you like some guy in the get going down. Yeah. Citizen internet citizen, right? Yeah. What. So, what's the like, you know, you know, it seems natural for get going to transform into a doubt. But tell us a bit about that process and like, what is the, what is the vision here for the

Dow? Totally. Um, well I made a big mistake when I first started coin, which is that we made it centralized to start and, you know, the tools didn't really exist back then to make it into a dour make it. Do you watch for the disgust of the people on Twitter who were responding to the, my question of what we should talk about? Yeah. I mean like, hand like hand to the air, if you're watching the video, see my hand in the air like I plead guilty. We built it centralized like I'm guilty.

I'm I'm sorry. I wish I hadn't done that. Also, and, and that's a big problem, and I think coming to grips to that has been a lot of the story for me over. The last two years is that you can't have a centralized funding infrastructure for a decentralized ecosystem or for a

decentralized world. And, you know, I think that the ecosystem deserves credible neutrality, the deserve to know that I'm not the ones with my hands on the lever of governance of get coin and that the community should be in charge of the governance of get coin. And so the launch of get coin, Dow was basically the imbuing of governance rights for. How these quadratic funding matching pools are allocated.

What are the rules of what's acceptable in them into a governance token called GTC which stands for get coin or I like to say it stands for grow the community. And, and basically, the idea is, we are returning an apple into an orange right now. We are turning a centralized company into a dow or at least returning the grants portion of our assets into in to get coins Owl. And the whole idea is basically that No company should own this infrastructure is should be a credibly neutral doll.

That's governed by the community that it serves. And that was the idea behind get coin dowel. We launched it on May 25th 2021, which is a day that will change the trajectory of get coin forever. We draw we dropped 18 GTC to 18,000 different members of the community, and basically allowed them to delegate to different members of the get coin Community to what we called stewards. So basically there's a big

problem. Of governance tokens where everyone wants to govern things in theory, but in principle, no,

one ever votes on anything. So we made everyone delegate to people who would actually be involved and would help govern get coin that when they first got there, there tokens, which I think was an Innovative way of making sure there was 100% consent of the governed, you know, other dials have like three to five percent voter turnout, get coins out regularly gets 80, or 90 percent voter turnout, because we've got these, like, delegated people, stewards that are aggregating,

the End of the governed in participating in governance votes. And so that was like our primary Innovation on governance for for Bitcoin. Dow was making. It was having that delegation layer that was 100% represented at the start in DNS. Has since copied our dowel delegation mechanism. I'm very proud to have pushed the space forward and very like

one small way there. But yeah, anyway, so we've decentralized the governance of get coin Dow and the surface area of that governance will increase as we launch a credibly neutral protocol. For quadratic funding and move all over the funding mechanisms from the centralized platform over to the protocol over. Hopefully the next 18 months. I'm like kicking the engineers under the table to tell be able to tell me that it's going to be sooner than that.

But um, but yeah, so decentralized governance, then decentralized the computation in the economics of the network and then I can have the feather in my cap and respond to those people on Twitter that are accusing me of being centralized, which is totally true right now. So, yeah, tldr can't have a centralized. Terry doing public goods funding for a decentralized ecosystem. And that's why we're moving a lot of these assets into the Dow. That's super cool.

Now. I'm afraid to check the Twitter thread. I'm probably getting hated on for being centralized know. Most of the most of the most responses were really, really positive, and we've covered a lot of it here. So this this idea of like the, you know, the problem with with governance, as you mentioned, like I think you accurately put it that there, everybody wants to govern but nobody actually ends up, governing. Do you think that the solution ultimately is?

Delegation, because that seemed like, to me, it's sort of It's sort of like analogous to the current system of governance that we have like in like, you know, just our regular politics, which ends up, creating all these negative externalities like career politicians and like, you know, corruption and stuff like that. And like recently in the recently in the cosmos Community.

Like there was this kind of uproar about like some governance votes that you may have been influenced by like some committee members Etc. And I think we see this thing once On the crypto space, there are other solutions to this. Like how do we get people more engaged? Like I'd be like a simple thing could just be like you get a you get a notification on your phone. There's something that's a vote on you just like vote on it there on the spot like what are other solutions to like this

delegation? Right. Well, I think that's a really great question. And I think that we should not shy away from these hard problems. The problem with the notification on the phone. Is that okay?

Well, now you're notified that you have to vote, but you have to actually expand the mental computational Cycles to understand the problem into vote, which like, you know, you're sitting there laying like watching Netflix and you get a notification that have to vote on something like, uh, like another thing for my to-do list, so, I don't know, like I think it's an unsolved problem and I'm supportive of seeing people innovate on. A problem.

The important thing for me was that the the communities consent of the consent of the governed from like political theory is the only legitimate basis for for governance as opposed to like, the divine right of kings which is what you know in like old like old times where the legitimacy of the government came from. And and I do think that you know, these web three networks that like get coin is 100%

giggling. Grants is for the Most we're trending towards 100% consent of the governed because it was the community that allocated their governance vote to community members. And and I think that that's super important to have those initial starting conditions. Yeah. I mean, I think that quadratic voting, which is basically more of a one human one boat type system, which prevents capture by Rich.

Elites is another area where people are innovating in terms of governance, and I would love to see more experiments and quadratic voting dials. I think we'll see those in the Next several years. And then the other thing is that which is a totally different category of governance, which is that every time you do a contribution on get going grants during a matching pool. You're actually don't like the

secret. The secret is going to be out after this podcast comes out but like you're actually governing where the matching pool goes. Every time you do a contribution on get coin grads. It just doesn't feel like voting every time you give a one dollar contribution in $500 more of the matching pool goes to a project because of it like we tricked you your governing, how the matching pool is distributed.

They're so these systems where there's robust signal already being generated that you can take that signal and channel it into a governance mechanism. Is hopefully an aggregation of the preferences of the community that is being governed. And I think that those are really elegant ways of creating governance, experiment that like didn't exist in a ski morphic old world type way. So I guess tldr.

I hear your criticisms, but I think that delegations better than what we had in web to, I think quadratic Voting is a way to improve on that, and I also think that robust signal generation in like the get coin. Grants example is another meaningful experiment and I hope to see a hundred experiments Blossom, that, that improve the ability for the consent of the governed to be expressed, in a digital way. And that's the challenge of Our Generation.

I think is upgrading democracy to be high bandwidth for the Next Generation. I think that that's, that's like really one of the hugest levers that to make the Better for Gen Z and gen Alpha. Is they inherit the world that we can do? Thank you. That was they were super enlightening. I have one more question that kind of ties in with the last couple of topics before we unfortunately have to rap and

that's the future of work. So basically, if you look at the way that get coin grants and the good coin dowel kind of, do it out work to different people. So how does this kind of tie in with the notion of the internet of jobs that you have publicised elsewhere? And how How does it differentiate itself from from the concept of a gig economy?

I think those answers are really unknown so far, but I can provide the way that I think about them, which will hopefully start to create shape for what the internet of jobs looks like in the readers are in the listeners Minds.

So, basically, in the internet of money, we have now created the ability for computers to send value across the computer network, and I think that's really exciting because it really means that we can reinvent how value is transferred in all segments of society to not need intermediaries and like, By the way, if you want to preview of how this is going to alert gonna look in 30 years, like just look at the internet of information when we took the computers and

we gave them the ability to send information across a computer network and that reinvented entertainment, media politics, all these things in society, that rely on information were Rewritten by the internet. And we have like a 30-year view on what that looks like. And now we have the ability to reinvent value transfer and governance and scarcity in society because computers can now send that across the computer network, and it follows from first principles that we're

going to rewrite. Right how the banking system works, which is defy, how art auctions work, which is n ftes. But no one everyone sleeping on. What is the future of work with within and and I think that we're all kind of like the internet of jobs is basically the design space that I think happens when the 99% of humanity that their financial lives is not their bank accounts and their Investments, but it's how

they earn a living. And what happens when that collides with Achtung technology and web, three era systems around data storage and distributed computation and dowels and in digital reputation. I think is an important thing here that I think digital reputation is foundational because when I want to make, like, you can't have like, a trust list interaction with like

an Uber driver. Like, when I want to have, when I want to hire someone to take me somewhere, then I need an assurance that they're not a creep and they're going to get me there safely. And And and I think that there's like reputation is a big part of how we do value transfer in, in our lives in am in so many different places. And so I'm curious to see what markets for doing knowledge work

together. Look like because the, the Uber Uber example is like a very rudimentary example, but because, because I only really care if it's like, they're gonna get me there safely and and quickly. But on get coin. When I hire a software engineer, I want to know, like do Because same language is me. Are they in the same time zone? Do they speak the same programming? Language is, do they have like a bunch of like communication or like emotional problems.

Are they reliable? Do they produce a good code? Are they gonna ghost me? Like there's this many more vectors and I think that reputation matters a lot, and the way I see this as different than the gig economy is like, the gig economy is what jobs look like, if you just like bolt and internet of jobs on Fiat rails, but now that we have this like open source. Mission list blockchain technology to program. The way we do value transfer

with each other. There's going to be non skeuomorphic ways of doing value transfer with each other, that like couldn't have existed in the old world. Skeuomorphism just means. Like, basically it's like native to the new environment as opposed to the new world and and in like I think a great example of that is coordinate, which is basically a tool where everyone in a dowel votes on whether or not everyone else is doing a good job, and then you drop tokens on the entire set of workers.

In a dow. That's an example of a non skeuomorphic. Use case for the internet of jobs is is like creating an intersubjective consensus of people who are working together of what they think of each other and then allocating tokens based off of that. I think paying people in governance rights is another really great example of a non ski morphic internet of jobs thing that didn't exist in the gig economy. If I pay you in dollars then like see you might go away after

that. But if I pay you in governance rights for a project that I'm involved, In then you have aligned incentives with me and in many, many different forms. And so the design space of Internet of jobs is just basically what happens when money, the internet of money collides with a society that it earns their living as opposed, to mix it from Investments, makes it off of Labor instead of

capital. And I think that the huge upside for the blockchain space, by the way, is that 95% of humanity 99% of humanity? Their financial lives is their jobs, not their Investments. What blockchains to go mainstream. Then you need to invest in dowels in the internet of jobs because that's like people don't. People are going to work on the financial are going to use the apps that have the financial use cases that they care about that, they solve for their job to be

done. And and so I think that's what the internet of jobs is. And I predict that an upcoming cycle will be around dowels and internet of jobs and future of work. And I think it's only a matter of time you can make the argument from first principles, the A net of value is Reinventing everything in society that has to do with value transfer, and jobs has to

do with value transfer. So, just follows from first principles to me, that will see a cycle that is all about the internet of jobs in the next several years. I really get the difference. I think between like the gig economy and the internet of jobs and like the difference is that you have in lined incentives. I think that's one of the main differences in that and the reputational aspect.

I think plays a huge role to, you know, reputation is something that's been notoriously hard to figure out on, you know, digit in the digital world, especially I

think in the crypto world. And I think that a lot of people looking at reputation, at least from my vantage point, as it, like an objective measure of like some data points that you can get from like, No, get commits, or like, you know, how long you've staked and something or like these sort of very objective measures but reputation is about so much more than that. It's about. Like there's all the subjective aspect as well. You were talking about talking the same language.

Well, you know that that's relative to you, but it might not be relative to like, you know, someone living in France for instance or in Germany. How do we, how do we, how do we come to terms with those sort of like, you know, of course you need to have the refugee the the objective things that we can objectively look at and measure you. Say, hey, like this person has like, you know, so many commits or whatever. And then the, the more

subjective aspects. Is that something that can be solved in the crypto space or is it like a coordination problem? That's goes beyond the scope of decentralized reputation, man, you know, I'm going to tell you that all coordination problems are solvable. That's like, you know, that's my whole stick is that we can solve these with coordination know. So I mean, I'll take that your questions in reverse order. We like so I think we should move from trying to find the

complete. Irrationally objective measure of like reputation which like appeals to me, by the way because I'm a software engineer and I love things that are like zeros or ones and they're tangible. And like, I know what I'm dealing with objectivity is a false idol, though. We want to create an intersubjective consensus of what multiple people think,

from, multiple, Vantage points. And that is, I think, like, once we write widen the aperture of design to intersubjective consensus, to just like, totally from totally objective, then I think that that is really Really what the Holy Grail is. Like, the your reputation is the sum of what people think of you around you. That's intersubjective consensus. And by the way, the inner subjective seek consensus, I'm trying to create is that coordination failures are solvable.

I want to move people from like, oh, we just have to live with this like decaying infrastructure to not like no, we could solve it. Like that's the inner subjective consensus. I'm trying to create and then the last point I want to make before I kick it back to you as like, who owns the infrastructure is a really big problem here, in a gig economy up. Work and Linkedin own all of our reputation data and and everything. And who owns the infrastructure

and web 3 is super important. I want to be able to take my identity from site to site to site, and I also don't want up were taking 10% of my of my fucking paycheck every month, like fuck that. And in the fact that LinkedIn their whole business model is taking your reputation data and selling it to recruiters Reid Hoffman makes Thirty billion dollars per year off of your fucking day.

Data, it's bullshit and wet. That's the one of the big differences between the internet of jobs in the big economies that we're going to all own our reputation data and take it from from place to place to place. But anyway, yeah, to actually answer the question. You asked me intersubjective consensus over objective measures, I think is where we're

going. Hmm. And what one thing, they also contain the mine here in researching this and so, like, reading your writings on the internet, a job aspect is, you know, what? Maybe some of the negative aspects Moving in this direction, as opposed to the sort of traditional employment model that affords, people stability, sort of long-term benefits as well such as Retirement or life insurance. And, you know, it's of immediate things like like healthcare.

Is this something that can be adapted to the internet of jobs model that are we going to start seeing Dow's offering like retirement savings plans, and And Health Care like health care packages for its members. Yeah, that's an extremely

important question. And I think that it's one of the things that really keeps me up at night is how much of our Legacy like the Industrial Age infrastructure, how much social safety net stuff is globbed on to jobs because there's not another better coordination mechanism for it.

I have a family and I want to I'm, you know, interested in end-of-life planning and making sure that my kids have a good education and planning for Retirement, and creating life, insurance, and health insurance, and all those things. And those things are all. Just grabbed onto jobs in the old world. I'm really excited by what obelus is doing in basically creating a bridge between the internet of jobs. And these social safety things.

We're basically, what they do is they create a corporation that you work for that. You get your retirement, your life insurance, and all that kind of stuff. And they just take a percentage of the earnings that you get from the Dow and pay for those things that way. So that's like a skeuomorphic way of adapting. Those things to Real world. And so, I think that the internet of jobs, absolutely is going to need to have core Primitives for how insurance is done.

How you plan for retirement, how you saved for education and hopefully Reinventing education by the way, so that it's not just like, you know, 45 thousand dollars per year to get an education at a college. I think that, you know, the there's a ton of debt that's Club Dogs, the old system and I think the unwinding that for the next generation is really important but like the more macro many parts of the world where We have this. So basically, I mean this is

this is a very u.s. Centric point of view, right? So basically, I'm jamming. I went to, I went to, I got a perfectly good, egg education here. I went to University and II did not pay anything, actually. Basically, if you go to university and your parents don't have enough money to, to fund your, to fund your living costs. You just get a loan from the government, you have to pay back half at zero interest and it's capped at I think. Thousand Euros.

So 16 as though basically, I mean, I mean this is this is its in parts of the word this exists, right? So basically it shows that it's not a huge Hopi envisioned. It can be done and in many parts of the world it is totally. Yeah and I'll just note that I am an imperfect vessel for a lot of these conversations. But what we did do is we just created an intersubjective consensus like you from Europe and B 4. America about what this could look like. And I think that that's

completely valid. There's also probably, you know, the infrastructure I can't speak to in Asia or South America what it looks like as well. But I guess like one last thing I'll say is that you know, like one of the things I think that the grit, the big risks of this spaces, that if you build the optimal sick, optimal signal generation mechanism for what people value, what do we do? If we build the perfect channel for people to express their preferences and they have shitty

preferences. Like what if you don't want to save for education or health insurance? Like I don't know what you do then other than you know invest in education and risk management and social safety nets from an infrastructure level. And then you get into complicated questions about like should be coerce people into into saving for education or retirement and and I haven't figured out the like what do we do?

If if like you build the signal generation mechanism and people have values that are like I haven't, I haven't worked out that part. Of the equation. Yeah, so the that's because there's a kind of my thoughts on the subject but I think that it's an unsolved problem. Yeah, and they're certainly like some non skeuomorphic, you know, like Paradigm shifts that that are meant to happen there.

So, you know, if you know that does this does funding education in 20 years from now, like if you're working for a doubt like, you know, does that look the same as what it looks like? Now just saving for retirement. Look the same like, you know, Health Care. Whereas Like that. I mean that's also there's also different levels here.

Right? I mean, to, basically there's things that kind of pertain to yourself and your own future, but saving for Education, typically actually pertains to your kids, futures, or at least, you know, the younger generation, so I feel like I mean, if you suffer from your own bad choices, okay, that's too bad. If your kids suffer from your bad choices, I think to me,

that's a different story. Sure. Yeah, one of the one of the, the sort of ideas that's in the book, which I originally got from UNC strickler. The founder of Kickstarter, is this idea of Bento is? MM, which is how do we move from a financial system that prioritises instant gratification to, which is now me, which is like, to to the group, which is now us. So, how do we move from? What's good for me now to what's

good for everyone? Everyone now or like my family now, and then the other Your is Futures, which is basically like, how do we move from now me to Future me and then like, you make, you make that into a 4 by 4 Matrix, and it's now me now US future us and future me. And so, how do we build a financial system that like passes? The marshmallow test of, basically, you know, how do we plan into the future? And how do we plan for the group

instead of the individual? And I think that that's just like a lens that you could look through the design of Ridge regenerative crypto economics. And in like, by the way, you like it, be hard to do worse than the old, find it like, at least in the United States. We have this quarterly earnings cycle and all of these, like, executives are just focused on their next quarterly earning cycle. And, you know, I think it'd be hard to do worse than that in

the crypto ecosystem. Hopefully, we can build better Primitives for coordination, that can plan. Further out for existential risks, that don't fit into the quarterly. The quarterly cycle likes a climate change or digital infrastructure. Yeah, I think I think somehow it's really difficult to kind of straddle the gap between what we think is right and what is generally done in the accept. Accept it in not question. So I mean basically, I mean Kevin you also have kids.

So basically you will also know this, they will ask you. Why does why does someone sleep on the street? Why don't we give them food? Why don't we give them? Why don't we give them money? So basically things that in principle seem like they are no-brainers. I mean, No one should go hungry, when obviously in principle, there's enough to eat. Right? So all of these things that that that kind of, that's there are

no brainers. When you explain them to kids, somehow we still get used to them and we don't question them everyday. So, how do you think we? We avoid Mora fatigue? That's a really great question. I think the first thing I'll say is that, you know, arguably were already suffering from a certain amount of moral fatigue. So maybe I'd reframe your question into how do we pay down the the moral fatigue, that we've inherited?

But the other thing that I'll say is that, I'm my really my goal for forget, coin is to build a channel that greater combinations of intelligence and strength can come together. And this is actually a key point, that Well, you know, it's not my values that like, I don't want the thing that causes that, I believe in to be to be the ones that are funded.

I want to build the most perfect, the, the best rails for expression of human values and for those combinations of strength and intelligence to come together.

And so, my hope is that, by building this coordination infrastructure that when you have these these areas where there's a very Clear coordination failure in the case of what you asked like, we failed to give this person on a street, a like food and probably home in like the chance to contribute to society and to be productive member of society. Like my hope is that by building the rails through which Humanity can express its preferences that we can that we can solve some of

these coordination failures. And you know, maybe we build this and it turns out people really do care about About homelessness. They just don't have a good coordination mechanism to solve it. And that would be the bullish case for this. This infrastructure and the bearish case would be 0. We build the signaled aggregation preferences and like, people don't care. They just like step over the person on the side of the street, and you know, that would

make me personally sad. But you know, at least we've got the value of the signal generation tools out there. And then I think it becomes like an education and, and like a governance question of like, why don't we care? About about these things. Like what is it about our values that causes us to? So I see you want to say something. Go ahead. Yeah, but Kevin, do you think it's a signal thing because basically I think I mean if you kind of change the context,

right? Say you go hiking and you see and and basically you're in the middle of nowhere in the Rockies and you come upon a person who's clearly hungry and thirsty and asks you for food. What do you do? Of course you give them. It. Right? Because you're the only person there, right? Basically, but as soon as you actually if, as soon as you transpose, the exact same thing is seeing a theme to downtown anywhere in the world. People react fundamentally differently because they think

this is no longer their problem. They are no longer. The only person who can solve it. And basically, this is society's problem now, right? So basically, I, I would kind of posit that basically there's like this disconnect between personal morality and societal morality that kind of absolves you from the human decency that to kind of act and you step over that person. And I'm yeah, so I'm not sure whether whether signaling is

actually the problem. You have a numbness of like the lack of hope I think, is is a real problem. So like, first, I want to say that like, I'm extremely privileged to be where I am in my life and working on something that I love and have a house and a family and all the Those hierarchies takes mostly taken care of. And I think that we should not take that for granted.

And and I really feel that like deeply when I hear your question asked, you know, when I wonder why we feel so numb in that situation and any other, the question that comes to mind for me. Is that in a hike? In May it the way I would try to rationalize it and this may be wrong, and it may be totally callous, even try to even try. But I'm gonna try against my better judgment.

Is that if I see someone lost in the woods, then my assumption is maybe, oh, they're lost, like, they just got lost and it was like a mistake. Whereas I think that there's many, many deep unfurled societal problems with homelessness in cities which have to do with probably Social City infrastructure. And by the way, this is worse in America than it is for you all in Europe. Probably mental health, education, drug abuse. And these are systemic problems. That cannot be solved by giving

someone a sandwich. Like, you know, if someone's just lost in the woods, I would presume there's less, there's less systemic issues there and I do think that those systemic issues behind the person in this city, which you know, may or may not be right on an individual basis.

Our human coordination failures, and I do think that, you know, we're kind of speculating here, but I do think that if you can solve for the education and and the drug abuse, and the lack of employment infrastructure and all that kind of stuff, then there may be, people will be less numb and and that we can have more hope but maybe that's an optimistic take and and and maybe it's even an appropriate for me to speculate about these things from my my place of privilege.

Well, I think we'll leave that note to end on it. But no, certainly this like been really fascinating discussions. As taking us down. All kinds of rabbit holes. It wasn't expecting it to get here. But yeah, this is great. So where can people find out more about the book, which is called green pill and and just get involved with what you're doing. Yeah. Thanks. So you can Google me. I'm Kevin a walkie and the only iwaki out there that I think that you'll find if you Google

that. And you can go to green pill dot party. If you want to download a digital version of the book, if any of your listeners are a teeth Denver, then I will be giving out physical copies there as well. Really enjoyed the conversation and I appreciated that we didn't go that we didn't gloss over the hard topics. Looking forward to continuing the conversation and thanks so much for having me and we'll have you again on but not in four years. Thanks. Again.

Keven a pleasure, sounds good. Looking forward. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find And subscribe to the show on iTunes Spotify, YouTube SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcast. And if you have a Google home or Alexa device, you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the epicenter podcast.

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